Isilon bigs up up data capacity

EMC World Isilon has increased the capacity of its NL nearline archival system to 108TB by using 3TB drives.

Isilon has a three-product lineup: the S-Series, which is focused on high-performance; the mid-range X-Series line; and the NL-Series, a system for archiving or nearline data.

Isilon NL systems come with a maximum of 72TB of capacity through using 36 x 2TB drives with the 72NL product. This meant there could be up to 10PB in a single file system spread across the maximum 144 nodes in an Isilon cluster.

The 108NL uses Hitachi GST 3TB drives in the same 4U enclosure as the 72NL. This drives the maximum file system size up to 15PB.

Isilon has also announced SmartLock software which provides Write Once: Read Many (WORM) capability with a file system, or parts of a file system, down to directory level, set as to be verifiably unalterable.

Isilon CEO and founder Sujal Patel said that we can expect future NL systems to have even larger capacities as disk drive sizes go up through 4TB and 5TB and beyond. He said Isilon's N+4 protection system protects against up to 4 disk drive failures and rebuilds failed drive contents faster than the week needed by ordinary RAID schemes with a 3TB drive.

He also said that we might expect the 144-node count maximum to increase in the next couple of years.

The Isilon 108NL box and SmartLock software are available now, with the 108NL having a list price of $123,500 per node. SmartLock list pricing starts at $1,950 per node. ®